If you’ve read our last two blog posts you have an idea of why an organization would adopt Salesforce Field Service and perhaps even a broad idea of what the service offers.  In this article, we’d like to give you a scenario in which you can see the real benefits of an integrated service system like Salesforce Field Service and how it can give your customers the experience they deserve.

Furnace Breakdown!

If you are a homeowner you know that the most likely day for your furnace to have a problem is going to be the coldest day of the year – or it will at least feel like the coldest day of the year!  BRRR.

You call your local furnace company and explain to a very patient service rep that your 20-year-old furnace isn’t working suddenly and you need help. Fast. Your spouse is starting to eye the kitchen table as kindling for the fireplace! The phone rep asks a long series of questions about, make, model, last cleaning (you didn’t know you were supposed to clean a furnace!), age of the house, square feet of house…. etc.  After 25 minutes of giving your details, you’ve got an appointment for Tuesday at 9:00 am.  Not a moment too soon.

On Tuesday morning you answer the door with your mittens on to the long-awaited service rep at 11:30. Her last call was more complicated than expected so she’s two and a half hours late.  O.K.  The service rep askes a long series of questions about, make, model, last cleaning (you didn’t know you were supposed to clean a furnace!), age of the house, square feet of house…. etc.  These are all of the same questions you answered on the phone when you called last week. She looks at the furnace, repairs the blower fan, and makes plans to come back later in the day with another part to fix something she calls a weird problem she’s never seen before with the widget that attaches to the something or other.  She also mentions that your brand of furnace is not her specialty.  She normally works on Acme Furnaces, and this is the first time she’s seen a McFurnace.  When you go to pay for the service call the field tech calls the main office with your credit card information and promises a receipt will arrive in the mail.  The good news is that you’ve got heat in your house again. The dog’s water bowl has thawed and you no longer have to wear gloves while you’re reading.

Two weeks later…. You guessed it.  Same thing. Something is not right! You call again. Give 25 minutes of detailed information and set up an appointment for tomorrow morning.  The next day a new to you service rep arrives at your house, asks you a series of questions you’ve already answered, comments that it looks like you’ve got a new blower fan, and says he sees that widget something or other problem all the time on McFurnaces.  He says he can do a makeshift repair, but you really ought to start thinking about a new furnace – TODAY.

The third time your widget something or another goes out, you call the sales department at “The Furnace Shoppe” and set up an appointment to get a quote on a new furnace. This call involved 20 minutes of giving information and history of your current furnace and setting up an appointment with a sales rep. The sales rep comes to your house looks at your furnace, comments on the new looking blower fan and the faulty widget, asks a whole series of questions, and begins to write up that quote.

Are you counting? At this point you’ve given the same information to six different people, none of whom seem to connect with each other.  There’s got to be a better way.  This is where Salesforce Field Service shines.

Key Performance Indicators

Every industry has its list of key performance indicators or KPI by which to measure success. The HVAC industry like most has an extensive list of KPI measures. In our Furnace repair scenario, the key performance indicators that could be improved include:

Profit and loss per HVAC truck: What is the profit and loss per truck? Do your repair fees align with the cost of insuring and maintain your fleet? If not it’s time to determine if the problem is the number of trucks, the resources on the trucks, or the tech and/or sales staff using the trucks.

Revenue: What is the revenue generated per department of your company? How many jobs do you need to sell per month to get to the break-even point? And how many can your staff efficiently accomplish? Once a company has determined the number of jobs needed to sell and perform to get above break even and make a profit the next set of KPI metrics are more refined and look at how your techs are doing their jobs.

The first-time fix rate is a key driver of customer satisfaction, as well as cost-efficiency. Wrong tools, wrong spare parts, wrong fault diagnosis, wrong engineer skill set—the causes are countless. Most can be managed away through better training, better control, and for our purposes here, a better field service management system.

Technician billable time. It’s important to keep a watchful eye on field service tech utilization. How much time does your field tech spend on the job, and how much time is spent driving to sites, delays due to lack of parts or knowledge, or admin tasks like time-consuming billing processes. An appropriate field service tech performance KPI can help you to get a handle on such losses of billable time.

Field service engineer punctuality. Almost as annoying as a field service engineer who doesn’t manage to fix the fault is a field service engineer who doesn’t arrive on time. Granted, it can be difficult to predict traffic conditions, even with route scheduling software. But a field service management system that tracks punctuality as an engineer performance KPI can help to pin down unnecessary delays.

Upselling rate. Finally, it can be very useful to track individual field service tech’s upselling rate. How often do your tech’s need to move from a repair situation to a suggested sale? Is your field service management system ready to handle a pivot to the sales department? Have you made it easy for your customers to make a smooth transition between the two teams?

There are lots more KPI metrics to consider of course, but let’s look at how Salesforce Field Service can help both your KPI metrics and your customer’s satisfaction at the same time.

Salesforce Field Service – Helping You Serve Your Customers Better while improving your KPI

Let’s look at how this whole situation could have gone better if “The Furnace Shoppe” used Salesforce Field Service.

That initial call may have looked the same.  You call, give your info and a field service technician is scheduled to come to your home. We all expect a certain amount of history intake when we run into a service problem. From there on out things could look a lot different.

With the Salesforce Field Service resources and skillset tools, you’ll be sure to dispatch a field service technician who is not just available, but also familiar with the problem at hand. Your customers will be reassured that you’re not wasting their time or yours by sending someone who has never seen their particular product.

Automatic real-time updates make sure you’ve got a way to be on time every time.  The Dispatcher Console lets you check for issues that require immediate action, track locations of mobile employees in real-time and schedule, or re-schedule, bulk job orders with a single click. If a job suddenly requires someone with a new or additional skill set, you can easily re-route someone to the job and backfill their current schedule. When your original field technician was delayed by a few hours the real-time updates within the Salesforce Field Service managed package make sure you know where all of your technicians are and who can be re-assigned in case of delay or emergency.  If you don’t have another tech with the right skill set or asset availability you have a way of contacting the customer right away rather than let them stew about late appointments and their future yelp review!

Asset tracking and management! Nothing is more frustrating than finding out you don’t have the particular widget to complete the job at hand.  In the service industry, you can’t anticipate every need, but you certainly can track the basics.  If you know that most repair jobs require a certain part, track your inventory, and make sure the trucks your techs are going out in are stocked per their schedules.  Be sure that the parts needed for the job are available in the truck going to the site. Sounds simple, but often this is an area that makes the difference between a good experience and a bad experience for the customer.

Have a knowledge hub available for your technicians.  This is along the same lines as asset tracking.  You can’t anticipate every situation, but you can anticipate the most common problems.  Salesforce Field Service gives you the ability to create a knowledge library of known issues and tricky repair hints. Field techs can contribute to it as needed and reference it when they get stuck.

Keep a history of the call and the work already done for the next time. Linking your mobile team through the Salesforce Field Service Mobile App gives them all the data they need to get the job done efficiently. Your mobile techs will see customer information and work history to avoid duplication of effort and optimize the escalation of services when needed.

Accept field payments. This is customer service 101. No one wants to wait around while your service tech calls in their credit card number to the home office.  Field techs can accept secured payments and let the customer get back to their lives quicker than ever.

What if a furnace repair visit turns into a furnace sales opportunity?  Salesforce Field Service can help you there too.  Rather than having your sales team make separate contact with the customer collecting data from scratch Salesforce Field Service allows you to connect sales and service at the click of a button.  Pivoting from service to sales with the least amount of doubling back will help you gain customer trust while saving time for everyone involved.

Interested?  We Can Help

Are you in a service industry that can benefit from the sleek and effective use of Salesforce Field Service?  We can help you evaluate your current system, plan for a change, and implement your new system. Get in touch with us today to talk about taking your company to the Next Level! Our dedicated team of Salesforce professionals can help you convert your current system to a user friendly, and efficient system giving you and your customers an outstanding experience. Contact us today.

The post Salesforce Field Service: A Scenario-Based Look first appeared on Cloud Next Level.

Cloud Next Level has been supporting Field Service Lightning set up and implementation since we began as a Salesforce Partner in 2018. We know what we’re doing. Now more than ever you may need help in pivoting your business towards a field service model. We know you’ve read hundreds of articles recently that start with “now more than ever.” How many of them were true? Probably a lot. Things have changed in the last five months. Your company is changing with the times.

A few weeks ago, we wrote about the advantages of using Salesforce Field Service Lightning to level up your service division and give your customers the best possible experience.  If you’re deciding if Field Service Lightning is right for you go ahead and read that article then come back here to take a deep dive into some of its features.

Cloud Next Level Can Help

In December of 2019 Salesforce reported: “71% of service decision-makers have already made significant mobile investments both in improved technologies and increased headcount. However, there’s still a difference between what companies say and what’s happening in the field — nearly half of mobile workers say they still waste significant time due to inaccurate or outdated job information.”[1]

Customer expectations for accurate, efficient, and safe field service work will only continue to rise as we move towards a continued safe-at-home world. A platform like Field Service Lightning in the Salesforce Service Cloud Suite fits the bill for ease of set up, use, and customizability. From service call intake, through scheduling, dispatch and onsite service professionals Field Service Lightning makes the job seamless for your company and most importantly the customers you serve.

Features of Field Service Lightning (FSL)

So, what does FSL offer? Field Service Lightning has three main elements that work together to give you a complete field service management solution.

• Core Field Service Lightning.
• Scheduling and optimization from a managed package.
• A mobile app for your mobile workforce.

Core Field Service Lightning

Features of Core Field Lighting include pretty much everything you need to set up a comprehensive service platform for your company. If you are repairing dishwashers, providing home health services, mowing lawns, or are a managed service provider in the tech industry, Salesforce FSL is the right tool for you. Out of the box, the FSL has the following features available for your admin to easily customize:

• Service Territories: Regions where field service work is performed
• Operating Hours: Times when field service work can be performed for service territories, service resources, and customer accounts
• Service Resources: Mobile employees who can perform field service work
• Service Crews: Teams of service resources that are assigned to service appointments as a unit.
• Skills: Skills required to perform field service tasks
• Time Sheets: Tools to track the time your field service employees are spending on tasks
• Work Types: Templates for common field service work, such as cable installations or furnace repairs
• Work Orders: Requests for field service work
• Service Appointments: Appointments for field service work
• Maintenance Plans: Plans that help you track preventive maintenance work using auto-generated work orders
• Product Items: Parts or services that can be requested, required, transferred, and consumed in field service work
• Product Requests: Requests for a part or parts
• Product Transfers: Transfers of inventory between locations.
• Return Orders: Records of inventory returns or repairs.
• Service Report Templates: Templates for customer-facing reports summarizing the status of service appointment and work orders

Field Service Lightning Managed Package

In addition to the above features in the Field Service Core package, FSL offers even more features with their Managed Package component for your scheduling and dispatch team and a sleek mobile app for those in the field. To be clear this package is part of the core services with a technical license upgrade.  It deserves to be highlighted separately thanks to its robust list of features. The list of features includes:

• Asset tracking & management
• Service history tracking
• Field payment collection
• Barcode scanner
• Inventory management
• Automatic real-time updates
• Guided instructions
• Service reports
• Collaboration
• Day view
• Centralized knowledge hub
• Native Android & iOS apps
• Work order management
• Offline priming sync
• Crew scheduling
• Routing
• Polygon mapping
• Contact database
• Return merchandise
• Authorizations
• Dispatching
• Contractor management
• Reporting & dashboards
• Service contracts
• One-click scheduling optimization

If your company is currently using a clunky system to manage work orders and track fieldwork, FSL can help you integrate work orders with accounts, assets, cases, and service contracts. As a bonus, you can keep ahead of maintenance contracts and help customers schedule on time necessary work that’s convenient for them.

The advantages of knowing your service and maintenance schedules and adjusting them easily will add up on your bottom line.

Dispatching becomes easy when using the Lightning Console to book appointments and automatically assign them to the mobile employee with the right skills in the right territory. You can track your assets available to each mobile tech and replenish before they run out. It includes options to see and track products that consist of several parts in a single view. Your customers will appreciate the rapid response from a field service tech who not only knows what they are doing but also has the right equipment and supplies with them.

What about special circumstances? It happens, a field service employee gets sick, a job runs over, a customer is unavailable at their scheduled appointment time or traffic simply makes it impossible to get to someone on time. No worries, the Dispatcher Console also lets you check for issues that require immediate action, track locations of mobile employees in real-time and schedule, or re-schedule, bulk job orders with a single click. If a job suddenly requires someone with a new or additional skill set, you can easily re-route someone to the job and backfill their current schedule.

Field Service Lightning Mobile

A huge benefit of Field Service Lightning is for the mobile employee. The Mobile App that connects to FSL is sleek and comprehensive. A recent article on the Salesforce blog said:

“Being a mobile worker in field service can be a solitary profession, which is a leading contributor to the high level of churn in the industry. Giving those in the field a connected device allows them to stay in sync with everyone back in the office.”[2]

 

Linking your mobile team through the FSL Mobile App gives them all the data they need to get the job done efficiently. Your mobile techs will see customer information and work history to avoid duplication of effort and optimize the escalation of services when needed. The App can be easily configured to provide task lists and recommended next steps and a knowledge base for those times when the solution needs more research. FSL Mobile App also includes the most obvious of needs such as schedules and real-time alerts from dispatchers.

We think the advantages of Field Service Lightning are obvious. It’s a package that easily transforms your Salesforce CRM into an agile business tool for the evolving service industry.

How can we help? With a team of experienced and certified developers and administrators, we’re ready to help you set up and maintain Salesforce Field Service Lightning.

Give us a call today to evaluate your needs. We’ll make suggestions for what you can streamline through FSL and how to do it.

We also have a top-notch training staff to help your staff learn to use, modify, and maintain your system. Let us help you take your company to the Next Level. Contact Us today!

The post Field Service Lightning – the key to taking your service system to the Next Level first appeared on Cloud Next Level.

Are You Ready to Take Your Field Service Team to The Next Level?

[On September 1, 2020 Salesforce changed the name of “Field Service Lightning” to “Salesforce Field Service.”]

Salesforce Field Service Lightning

If your company has a service division and you are still working from Excel spreadsheets and Google calendars to schedule tech visits and inventory it’s time to level up! Salesforce Field Service Lightning is the platform you should consider to simplify and consolidate. There is no reason to use multiple systems when you can get more efficient functionality with a single platform. Businesses with external service teams are gaining more customers daily. Customers expect outstanding service. The trick is to make sure your service business grows AND your customers get the service they deserve. Salesforce Field Service Lightning can work for you no matter how large or small your service team. There are three basic things to consider when looking at Field Service Lightning. All revolve around who are your target users:

• Are you in need of a system simply for your dispatchers and field tech staff?
• Do you have contractors that only need limited access to internal information?
• Do you want to integrate your service department with your sales department?

Let’s look at all three scenarios to see what Field Service Lightning can do for you.

The Basics

You’ve got a great team of dispatchers and field techs. They are doing their best, but they need to open multiple screens and work in three different systems to take incoming calls, schedule service, and track assets. Think about how much time you could save if all of those components were in the same system with a mobile app to make your service techs lives easier. Think of the happy customers you’ll have when your tech arrives on time and fixes the problem at hand with ONE easy visit! The Field Service Lightning core managed service package with technician and dispatcher licensing is the tool for you. You can create work orders, book services, track your assets, and build opportunities with quotes. It’s the path from spreadsheets to an actual system! Your dispatcher can schedule based on availability, location, and skill. They’ll know if you’ve got the right assets available for the job and how to bill the job against maintenance packages or a la carte expenses. Dispatchers can also prioritize service calls based on the urgency of the issue. A broken air conditioner in July can take precedent over a furnace cleaning. With the mobile app field techs can see the history of the issue, the tools, skills, and assets needed for the project and report back to dispatch when things are completed. They can also track their asset usage and be ready to replenish. No one likes going out to a job and not having the right tools or products to finish the job well. A more fluid and efficient service department makes for happier customers. We all want that.

The Next Step

Let’s say you’re a growing company. Those happy customers you’ve won are recommending you to their friends. This is great, but you’re not quite ready to take on more permanent staff yet. You have a core staff doing the work at hand, but you’ve taken on contractors to complete some of the work. Someday they’ll be part of your company, but for now, you’ve contracted them to do a specific job. Field Service Lightning is ready for that as well. Adding a contractor and community licenses to your Field Service Lightning can do that for you. No need to build a separate system for contractors, Field Service Lightning allows third party contractors the ability to work with the mobile app, but controls their access to proprietary information. You choose what they can and can’t see, as well as how and when you use your contracted staff. As a growing company, the benefits of additional functionality for a minimal cost gives you the flexibility you need to grow at the pace you’re comfortable with. Again, the goal is satisfied customers, so if you’re able to level up seamlessly they’re more likely to call on you again.

All In

All that is well and good, but if you’ve got a robust staff and are ready to go all-in with a service system that integrates fully with your sales system Field Service Lightning offers an option for that too. It’s called Field Service Lightning Plus. As you would imagine it offers all of the flexibility and consolidation mentioned above but integrates it with your Sales Cloud function as well. Your techs are great, but sometimes that 30-year-old furnace is just beyond what a repair can do. They know that it’s in the customer’s best interest to cut their losses and think about something new. That’s where the integrated system comes into play. The field service rep can make the customer happy with an immediate fix, and get all the information needed to the sales department. When the customer meets with sales, the system requirements, and customer needs are already recorded. The customer doesn’t have to start from scratch with someone new and the salesperson doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel trying to determine the parameters of the customer’s situation. Win, win! Happy customers, informed sales team, helpful field techs. This is the kind of scenario that gets you five-star reviews on Yelp!

Cloud Next Level Can Help You Level Up

So, whether you’re looking for a platform to simply help you move from spreadsheets to a real “system,” or you’re looking for an integrated sales/support application, Field Service Lightning can meet your needs. At Cloud Next Level, we’ve got a knowledgeable and dedicated team that knows all the ins and outs of Field Service Lightning. We’ll help you evaluate your current system and map out a plan to take your company to the Next Level! Contact us today, we can’t wait to help you.

The post Field Service first appeared on Cloud Next Level.